Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

A Playwright’s Progress 85
disaster and an utter defeat for Eliza as a human being. In Shaw’s ending
Eliza becomes a strong, self-respecting, and admirable person; in Pascal’s
she is reduced to choosing perpetual slavery to a bad-tempered man who
will always treat her poorly, not because he is mean or cruel but only because
he is thoughtless and self-absorbed. To see this is to understand what
Shaw meant by “learning to respect reality” (Pref. Pleasant Plays 1:385).
The Tragic Fallacy
There are, however, sound philosophical reasons for Shaw to shun the
tragic ending. There are two principal views of the “meaning” of the tragic
ending (apart from the “meaning” of tragedy as a whole, which is rather
more complex). One is that it encapsulates a “tragic view” of life, a view
both pessimistic and resigned. Shaw’s discussion of tragedy generally reflects
this view. The other, and older, conception of the tragic denouement
is that it represents the expiation of a moral flaw in an otherwise good
character. This notion naturally, if illogically, gets mixed up with the concept
of a saint’s martyrdom. It is as if we in the audience felt that if one can
balance one’s moral ledger by discharging debts with pain, a surplus of
suffering will give us a positive balance, even to earning sainthood when
the agony is great enough. Two notions to which Shaw’s philosophy is
most opposed are hopeless despair and retributive justice. Most people
think that despair and expiation are concepts shunned by the weak and
embraced by the tough-minded; Shaw saw them as debilitating and intoxicating
drugs that shield weak consciences from responsibility. To despair is
to declare that there is nothing to be done and the spurious quality of a
conscience redeemed by pain rather than good works is obvious. Shaw’s
comic endings are conclusive in that they finish up the action of the play;
they are happy (usually) in that they show hope for the future; and they
are open-ended in insisting on the responsibility of the characters to realize
that hope. Every such ending, in other words, is a beginning. “Happily
ever after” is an opium dream, a coward’s way of obtaining the escape of
death without its terror.
Dramatic Realism and Moral Equality
Shaw agreed with the techniques of traditional realists insofar as he agreed
with their view of reality. The core of his dramatic realism, however, seems
strange at first to anyone used to thinking of Zola and Maupassant as representing
the epitome of realism. Shaw’s realism is rooted in his belief in